If anyone did, their task would be gargantuan, for the present generation has rejected both the vision and the manner of the sixteenth president as decisively as many have rejected that of the founders.There is too little statesmanship to match the gravity of the hour, and too little analysis that goes beyond supporting one side of the other....Guinness does not explicitly talk about our current leaders by name nor does he engage in political partisanship, but his words about the lack of statesmen aroused in me the thought that, in fact, the American people really don't want to be led by statesmen, and our politics of the last three decades are pretty good evidence of that.
For example, in the 1990s the Republicans nominated George H.W. Bush (1992) and Bob Dole (1996), two fine political eminences, to run for the office of the presidency. The Democrats nominated a scandal-plagued philanderer named Bill Clinton. The American people voted for Mr. Clinton - twice.
In the 2000s, the Republicans nominated John McCain (2008) and Mitt Romney (2012), two very experienced and ideologically moderate political leaders very much in the mold of Bush and Dole. The Democrats nominated Barack Obama, a far-left Alinskyite community organizer with almost no political experience to speak of. The American people elected Mr. Obama - twice.
Finally, in frustration, rank and file Republicans decided that they'd had enough with nominating moderate statesmen. They concluded that the American electorate doesn't want statesmen, rather they desire in their leaders the same thing they demand in their entertainment: conflict, charisma, afflatus, glamour, scandal, drama, celebrity. The GOP rank and file realized that their party would never win another presidential election if they kept running responsible, straight-arrow grown-ups who didn't embody at least most of the traits of a rock or movie star.
After twenty years of losing (George W. Bush was an anomaly whose elections were abetted by the Democrats, who, forgetting what the Republicans hadn't yet learned, nominated two vanilla politicos, Al Gore (2000) and John Kerry (2004) who, in terms of personality, if not political temperament, could've been Republicans) the GOP base decided that they'd had enough.
They acknowledged that the people who'll get elected to top positions of leadership in twenty-first century United States are people who could have either stepped off the front page of a tabloid or who promise to hand out goodies like Santa Claus.
They recognized that neither experience, statesmanship nor character is important to the majority of American voters, certainly not those who vote Democratic. This sad conclusion was confirmed in the minds of many conservatives when the Democrats proceeded in 2016 to nominate for the presidency a thoroughly corrupt Hillary Clinton, of all people.
Having given up trying to get the voters' attention with fine men like the elder Bush, Dole, McCain and Romney, they finally said "Enough. Let's nominate the sort of man the American people apparently want."
So they nominated Donald Trump, and it proved to be an inspired choice. The Democrats hate him, of course, but only because he's a winner who's reversing the long march toward big brother socialism begun under Franklin Roosevelt and continued under presidents of both parties, but especially under President Obama.
If Trump were still the Democrat he once was, advancing the same policies that Mrs. Clinton would have advanced, the media would be slobbering with adoration and stumbling all over themselves to find excuses for his abrasive, combative style. He'd be the perfect Democrat candidate. They'd love his demeanor were he one of them, and no one would ever hear a peep about his sexual coarseness and legal indiscretions on the evening news.
I have a friend who laments that millions of women are "aching" that we've elected such a boorish individual to be our president, but I wonder whether they ache because of his vulgar talk or because he's a Republican rather than a Democrat. After all, millions of women just like the ones who ostensibly lament Mr. Trump's ascendency, voted for John Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and now Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey who has been credibly accused of sexual congress with underage girls in the Dominican Republic.
So why would women vote for these men but express revulsion and loathing for Donald Trump? Perhaps it's because they all had D's after their names, a circumstance which often wins absolution from female admirers for behavior that'd earn a Republican a trip to the political guillotine.
The point is that the majority of the American electorate really doesn't want moderate statesmen. They want bread and circuses, signs and wonders. If they wanted statesmen some of those four Republican candidates mentioned above would've been elected president.
But, because those men all pretty much got trounced, the frustrated Republican base threw up its collective hands and gave us Donald Trump, and many of the people who excused the behavior of the philanderer ("character doesn't matter" we were told) and swooned at the speeches and the crease in the pants of the community organizer, now profess to be outraged that the American people have ensconced Mr. Trump in the Oval Office.
They have no one to blame but themselves.
